Amazon has launched Neptune, a graph database that can be used to create relationship graphs of highly connected datasets. Neptune is a fully managed service, and is among the slew of announcements made at AWS re:Invent.

While the announcements about the new product make no mention of the history of the product, it seems to be based on Blazegraph, a well-known graph database that rumor has it was acquired by Amazon last year. The domain was certainly acquired by Amazon, and a number of key Blazegraph developers now work at Amazon, including Brad Bebee, CEO of Blazegraph until this year, and now giving sessions on Neptune at Re:Invent. The name Neptune may well have been decided on because Janus and Titan are both big graph databases.

Amazon describes Neptune as being based on a purpose-built, high-performance graph database engine optimized for storing billions of relationships and querying the graph with milliseconds latency. Recommended uses for Neptune include recommendation engines, fraud detection, knowledge graphs, drug discovery, and network security.

Amazon Neptune supports two open standards for describing and querying graphs - Apache TinkerPop3 style Property Graphs queried with Gremlin, and Resource Description Framework (RDF) queried with SPARQL. Gremlin is a graph traversal language where a query is a traversal made up of discrete steps following an edge to a node, while SPARQL is a declarative language based on Semantic Web standards from W3C. Data can be imported from S3, and for the Resource Description Framework (RDF) graph model, Neptune supports Turtle, N-Triples, N-Quads, and RDF/XML serializations. Property graphs are limited to CSV.

Neptune is designed to be highly available, with read replicas, point-in-time recovery, continuous backup to Amazon S3, and replication across Availability Zones. It is in preview at the moment, and will be charged on a usage basis.